Leaving aside the issues of TOR and TOR browser, the CP and the vulnerabilities, sometimes it's just not a real option for your website, but you want to maintain your privacy anyways. It seems like it is possible to host on clearnet without getting compromised. TPB hasn't had any major arrests in a long time, and their servers are very resilient, showing that it's possible to evade the wrath of the FBI and MPAA cartel while giving people a clearnet website to connect to. Here's a somewhat vague article on their setup:
torrentfreak.com
I guess my main questions are these:
The article says that the real servers are hidden because the user-facing servers have an encrypted connection to the real servers. But couldn't NSA/GCHQ/etc just look at the patterns of web requests coming from the user-facing servers?
And what's the main entry point for end users? The proxy server? The load balancer?
How would one go about creating a setup with a main server hidden behind other servers?
Anonymous/Secret Web Hosting... WITHOUT TOR
Are you stupid? You set up 20 public facing servers at rando places, and they proxy to your back-end. It's not complicated. Its also a shitty solution compared to tor.
Ok, so NSA or whoever just investigates what servers the public-facing servers are connecting to. Then they find the back-end. Right?
They could go find the proxy / load balancer tier and see where they connect. With literally anything they can do that. You can use a proxy chain to make it much harder.
So what's keeping TPB up? NSA just won't help out the feds? Servers are in uncooperative countries where it actually is hard for the NSA to snoop via ISP or physical access?
...or you could just use Tor
What are they doing that is illegal? They share magnet links. They don't host any files.
Maybe they are still alive because they are controlled by the feds...
I'm on the anti-copyright side here, but do you think "I don't sell illegal goods, I just tell people where they can buy illegal goods for a small fee" should be a valid defense?
If unauthorized copying is illegal it's reasonable for knowingly facilitating that on a massive scale to be illegal. The issue here is unauthorized copying, not technicalities about magnet links.
they've been busted in the past.